Part 2: What are the biggest challenges in testing Mobile App?

The goal of any application testing is to understand the quality and performance of the features offered. However, there are some critical factors which make mobile application testing becoming a far greater challenge to any app developers:

1. Devices: The Biggest Mobile Testing Challenge

The biggest challenge when it comes to mobile application testing is the plethora of devices spread across different platforms.

Obviously, it is not feasible to test your app on each and every available device which means you have to strategically choose a few physical devices.

One needs to remember that testing on one device never assures it would work on any other device, irrespective of whether it is of the same make, same OS Version or using the same platform! Not testing on a physical device always runs a risk of potential failure of that device, specially when the target audience for the application is widespread, like for a game.

To handle the device issue, you may have three options:

You can test exclusively using real devices

Testing with emulated device. This approach will be less expensive but the emulated devices will not run properly some times as in real devices.

or using a combination of each device.

2. Different platform testing

In the case of the native app, it goes without saying that it will need dedicated testing effort on all platforms for which it is developed. It gets a bit tricky in the case of HTML5 based hybrid applications. While the code remains same, the lot of factors come into play on different platforms.

3. Testing on different OS versions of the same platform

You did test your application on all major platforms like Android, iOS, Windows etc but each one of them has several OS versions floating in the market.

An obvious choice is to test on the most recent versions of all the platforms. Its interesting to note a big difference in Google’s and Apples’s approach in handling the OS updates. While the former relies on device manufacturers to update the respective devices, Apple handles the updates itself resulting into mass updating of all Apple devices as soon as a new OS version is released. Whatever is the OS version on a device, the user can still install your application and use it, which calls for testing different OS versions.

4.Mobile user

This could be the last challenge. Mobile application audience comprises of various people ranging from non-tech people to skilled users, from children to middle age users. Each of these has their way of using the application and have their own expectation from it.

A middle age user will be much more patient than someone in the twenties when it comes to the response time. Generally speaking, mobile users have incredibly high expectations from the applications! Tester has to wear different hats while testing the application and make sure that it provides a good overall response to all users and does not cause grief to a particular set of users.